SpaceX Is Reportedly Raising $500 Million To Go To The Moon And Beyond

SpaceX Falcon 9 launches a Dragon capsule to the International Space StationSpaceX

SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell says she’s confident that her company will be sending people to Mars in a decade. Now the company is reportedly raising some much-needed capital to bring it to that goal.

A Wall Street Journal report published Tuesday stated that SpaceX plans to raise an additional $500 million in a new investment round. According to the report, the funds would be raised at a $30.5 billion valuation, and the round is expected to close by the end of the year.

Only after closes will it be clear whether the full $500 million investment will materialize. In April, the company authorized selling shares to raise $507 million in a Series I round, but the round ended up closing with only $214 million raised, according to Pitchbook.

The funds are reportedly being raised from SpaceX’s existing investors as well as new investor Baillie Gifford & Co., which also holds a stake in the Elon Musk-led electric car company Tesla. Both Baillie Gifford and SpaceX declined to comment on this story.

The new round of funding comes just a few weeks after the company took out a $250 million leveraged loan in a deal led by Bank of America after it had reportedly considered taking on a total of $750 million in that loan deal.

According to the WSJ report, the influx of capital will go to fund the development of SpaceX’s planned satellite internet network as well as its Starship spacecraft and Super Heavy rocket, the latter of which is currently scheduled to take billionaire Yusaku Maezawa and a group of artists around the Moon in 2023.

In an interview with NPR’s Marketplace last week, Shotwell said the Moon was only the first stop, restating the company’s long-standing position that it intends to develop spacecraft to send people to Mars. “I think we’ll have a machine that’s certainly capable of taking people to Mars and back in ten years.”

“It introduces some risk for the company and for shareholders, since a failure would force the company to pay back the loans or return capital to investors without the cash flow that the projects promise,” said aerospace analyst Bill Ostrove. “However, I would expect a company making the types of investment that SpaceX is making to need a large amount of money.”

It’s a risk, but one that Musk has been well aware of for years. In April of 2012, before his company had made the first of what are now routine cargo trips to the International Space Station, he told me: “This is not the path to go to maximize riches. It’s a terrible risk adjusted return. But it’s gotta happen. I think that for me and a lot of people, America is a nation of explorers. I'd like to see that we’re expanding the frontier and moving things forward.”